Fine. This is bad and very sloppy on the part of the paper setters Edexcel. And, no, it should never have happened.

However, protestations from students that this will somehow have  a significant effect on their results is just cobblers. And yes, at least one has already made this protest.

One of the pupils who sat the biology exam, on 16 May, has e-mailed the BBC News website to complain the disruption caused by trying to make sense of the error could affect his university application.

“This was a re-take for me, so the time I lost spent on that question could possibly have cost me a university place, right before the fees go up,” he wrote.

From the BBC article

The initial protest that the question could not be answered is correct, but irrelevant. With the paper marking system using standardised results the only result is that the paper effectively has one less question on it. All students lose one mark and the standardisation smooths out any minor differential (there were after all 425 questions on the paper so any skew will be so small as to be irrelevant and, as I say, standardisation takes care of that anyway).

The second protest is that encountering the unanswerable question somehow disturbed students so badly, as they spent time puzzling over how to answer the question, that it significantly affected their result is also bogus. Firstly, exam technique 101 says, ‘if you come across a question you cannot answer immediately, skip it and come back to it later’. If you’re too dumb to do this I guess your results won’t be up to much anyway. Secondly, this is a multiple choice AS-level exam for further education students (looking to go to university in many cases); life is seldom so good to you that it provides the answer along with the questions – and you’re really gonna get a shock when you go to university where you’ll be expected to actually know (or even have the think out the answer from first principles) for yourself without having it provided on the exam paper.

It’s a really sad indictment of our society and the education system when a student, at this level of study, feels that one out of 425 questions being unanswerable due to human error will have such a significant effect on their results.

I can see it now, there will be students (hopefully not many as I’m sure most are smart enough to realise this is ridiculous) who will protest that ‘but for that one question I would have achieved a better result. The exam board are responsible for my failure, not me’.

The UK referendum on changing the voting system used in general elections from first past the post to alternative voting failed to produce the result I was hoping for. We’re stuck with the old, and in my opinion inferior, first past the post system.

66.8% of people who voted wanted to stay with the old method.

Having looked through the voting breakdown I am astonished at the decisiveness of this result. I’m also a little puzzled.

The first thing to note is that less than 50% of people with voting rights chose to take part in the referendum. The second thing to note is that the vote was fairly uniform across the country; very few constituencies produced an outcome in favour of AV and a great many produced the 70/30 split.

I can’t help wondering why?

Are people really that fond of the first past the post system? It produced demonstrably unrepresentative governments and yet people want to continue using it.

The AV system, despite its flaws, produced results that reflect much better the preferences of the voters. And yet people either did not understand this or simply don’t want their government to represent them. Since the latter seems unlikely, I can only conclude the former.

Perhaps the No campaign was right. Perhaps the public really do find it too difficult to rank candidates in order of preference.

Given the conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for voting (in this referendum or the general election) it may well be that people are so indolent that they just don’t care which method is used. After all, if you’re choice is ‘I don’t care’ then it really doesn’t matter which method is used to not count your non-vote.

So, from now on, if someone starts pissing and moaning about politicians or the way the country is governed I shall be supplementing my usual ‘did you vote in the last election’ question with ‘did you vote for AV’. If you answer in the negative to either of these questions then you lose all rights to moan about your government.

Having forgotten to cancel my usual alarm it went off at 7:30. It’s a radio alarm. Can you guess what topic, above all other news available, was being covered? And in considerable depth. Well for the few minutes it took me to drift to consciousness and turn the radio off and go back to sleep.

Finally, around midday I decided I should get up. So I wander into my office and go through e-mail (mercifully wedding free). Then I see Twitter is open. What is the only thing people care to Tweet? So shut down Twitter.

Ah, news feed time. I open Reeder (my preferred RSS reader) and start looking through items that have arrived since yesterday. Mostly good stuff (technical, gadget and investment news), but then I hit the mainstream news feeds. BBC news; at least 40% wedding articles (apparently it’s important for me to know which vacuous celebrity has just arrived, as it happens). Right. Just clear out all that news. Ah CNN, a potential beacon of sanity. Oh WTF! MORE WEDDING news. Even the US has caught the disease.

So, all main news is simply ignored for today.

I can’t bear the prospect of hearing or watching any news programs today. The TV and radio will be awash with that F%&*ing wedding, so they’re out (which is probably a god thing).

So today will be reading, writing, watching a DVD, eating, drinking and perhaps some surfing of the Interwebs.

Hmmm! Well, apart from the news embargo things are actually shaping up quite well.

And here’s another one explaining AV from an historic perspective.

This afternoon a leaflet dropped through (well, was shoved through) my door and a few seconds scanning it were enough to push my blood pressure up a few notches. So much so that I felt compelled to write this, somewhat lengthy, post.

The UK will, on May 5th 2011, have a referendum that may change our voting system in general elections (for those unfamiliar with UK voting, general elections are those where we vote in, or out, our representatives in the House of Commons, essentially voting for our government). The proposal is a simple choice; maintain the existing system (usually referred to as ‘first past the post’), or replace this will a more proportional system called Alternative Voting (AV).

Now, I’m no fan of AV. It is possibly the worst of the proportional voting systems available (which is precisely why the government is allowing it though). That said, I’m even less of a fan of the current first past the post system. This referendum is a choice between two poor choices and the government is hoping that most people will simple stay with the devil they know rather than change.

Quite apart from the political flag waving and vested interest in the status quo, one of the problems with the referendum is trying to explain the differences in the two systems such that voters can make an informed decision. This leaflet does much flag waving and scaremongering and very little actual explanation.

I will ignore the cover page as it is simply a call to arms for the No vote.

The first page states as fact that the cost of AV is £250million. It then goes on to use some dubious figures to scare the unthinking reader.

Let’s take a look at these statements.

First, the referendum is costing £91 million. This is probably true (more or less, although it does not make clear whether this is £91 million in total, or £91 million of tax payer’s money—given the tone and nature of this document I’m guessing the former). Two responses spring to mind; if you simply changed to AV without the referendum this cost would be zero, and secondly I ask ‘what price democracy?’

If the decision to change voting method were simply voted on in the House of Commons then there would be no need for a referendum. One might say, ‘outrageous, you can’t make that decision on a house vote’. And I respond, ‘why not? Bigger, and more costly, issues than this are decided all the time on a House vote’.

This same fatuous argument could be levelled at any referendum or election. We live in a democracy and part of that is being able to vote on large issues. This costs money. The £91 million cost of the referendum is bogus.

Next they claim that a change to AV requires £130 million for new electronic voting machines. Again, bogus. AV can be administered manually, just as the current voting system is. Sure, the votes may take a little longer to tally, but so what? And this costs assumes that they are not inflating the cost (which given that they want to convince you this is a bad thing they almost certainly have). No doubt this cost is, at best, based on the most expensive machines available and adjusted up for all sorts of guesstimates such a inflation etc. So, this cost is probably at best inflated or totally irrelevant. It certainly tells us nothing about the relative merit of AV compared to the first past the post system.

Then they claim an additional £26 million to explain the new system. Really? A simple notice, possibly with a person on hand, in each polling station should be sufficient. The AV system is extremely simple (as I shall explain below, at no cost to the government). Besides, we’re having a referendum. Surely there’s enough bloody explaining going on now. Every leaflet, news bulletin, newspaper article, and on, explains the AV system in full colour animated graphics. If people have not got it by now then spending more money is not going to help matters. And if you don’t think the £91 million being claimed as the cost of the referendum is sufficient to educate people enough that they can vote whether to adopt the system of not (I mean, surely they need to understand it to vote on it) then another £26 million is not going to help much.

Finally on this page, they pull out the emotive card and explain all of the things this inflated cost figure could be used for. Lots of doctors, nurses, teachers, hip replacement or school places. No doubt each categories numbers would only pay for these placements for one year and in total. So, 2,503 doctors (for one year) OR 6,297 nurses (for one year). Doesn’t seem such a great deal when viewed this way, but that’s the point they want you to think ‘AND’ not ‘OR’ and they want you to think this means ‘forever’ not just one year.

And down the bottom of the page, the leading question ‘At a time when people are losing their jobs or having their pay frozen, should we really be spending this money on a politician’s fix?’ Than answer is obviously no, but this is rather contingent on accepting the premise that this is ‘a politician’s fix’ rather than a move to more democratic elections (which the ‘yes’ camp would have us believe).

Page two is no better.

This is reasonably clear summary of the AV system, but it tries to paint a picture of unfairness. The emphasis is that ‘Under AV the votes for the least popular candidate can decide who wins the election’. This statement falls somewhere between disingenuous and complete bollocks.

Under the AV system (for all its many flaws) the candidate who wins is the most popular candidate, albeit not necessarily everyone’s first choice. (Other proportional representation schemes establish the most popular candidate much more effectively, but we’re not being offered those options. We must choose between first past the post and AV.)

The graphic shows ‘Your Choice’ as candidate A and then shows the process by which candidate B wins the election. Damn! That’s unfair! Candidate A got the most votes in the first round, surely they should win even though most people did not vote for them. Let me say that again, under first past the post, which is essentially the outcome of round 1 of the vote: Most. People. Did. Not. Vote. For. The. Winner!

Of course they emphasis ‘your vote’ in the illustration, just to help your indignation a little.

Think of AV like this. Suppose your have a family of five people and they are voting on which of three holidays they would like to go on. They decide to use AV to decide and the vote looks like this.

The options (candidates, or in this case holidays) are:

1. Fiji
2. China
3. Australia

Consider what this says. Bill would like to go to Fiji, but if Fiji is not voted in he prefer that China were the destination over Australia. Similarly, Mary would like to go to China, but failing that she prefers Fiji to Australia. And so on.

Under first past the post we would need to re-run the election because both Fiji and China have two votes and we must have only one winner.

Under AV we simply drop Australia (it got only one vote in the first round) and add Simon’s second choice to the pile for China. Now China is the clear winner with three votes.

While it is true that Bill, Sarah and Simon failed to get their first choice you can see that Bill, Mary, Simon and Leslie get either their first or second choice.

AV is about trying to establish which candidate is most popular overall.

And, under AV you have the right to not rank candidates. So if you really don’t want your vote to count for candidate X, don’t rank them. Simple.

The third page is just feeble minded.

It first tries to equate politics with a race, which is only true if you’re a politician with a vested interest in the current first past the post system. It then goes on to state, as if fact, that ‘There is a very simple principle in politics and governments — whoever gets the most votes wins’. This is just plain wrong in almost every syllable.

Many vote require a certain majority, for example, when electing the speaker of the House at least 51% of politicians sitting in the House must approve them (in a procedure the results of which are not unlike AV). Now, true that this is ‘most votes wins’ and if first past the post required the same ’51% of people must approve their MP’ I’d have no problems with it. But politicians are very rarely voted in with a 51% of people who vote, let alone 51% of the people in their constituency.

Most sitting MPs were not approved by anything like ‘most’ of their constituents.

Yay! They pulled the BNP card. This is the UK politics equivalent of ‘Hilter was <insert the thing you’re opposed to>’. It’s pathetic.

Look, votes for the ‘extreme parties like the BNP’ do NOT get counted over and over again. The suggestion is that BNP candidates will get in under AV when they would not otherwise. What a load of arse.

I, for one, am extremely unlikely to ever rank a BNP candidate, so my vote would never contribute (no matter how AV votes stacked up) towards voting them in. It’s true that someone voting BNP as their first choice may well get a ‘second vote’ (their second choice, had they chosen to exercise that right), but this is far from voting for the BNP. It is possible that the BNP could make it through the first round and that enough people vote in their second choice into the second round to push them over 50%, but that’s democracy for you.

Then ‘The AV system will mean an end to equal votes’. Another steaming pile. As for the ‘That’s a principle that people in Britain have fought for over many generations’, well true, if many means four or five, but realistically up to the late 18th century not much was done about voting for 97% of the population (ironically, the struggle for voting right—for men at least—was fired in part by the French Revolution). But I digress.

Then the leaflet presents the first past the post argument.

Evidently no need to make an effort here as it’s what we have now.

What this page singularly fails to highlight is that Candidate A may have more votes then the other candidates individually, but they hardly have the most votes. Add up the other candidates’ votes and it quickly becomes obvious that most people voted for someone other than the ‘winner’. In other words most people are unhappy with the outcome of this election and, under first past the post, they have no other say in the matter. They have no way of saying, ‘look I like candidate C, but if they don’t get in I’d rather have candidate B than that worthless asshole candidate A who’s sitting in a safe seat because the last lot gerrymandered the constituency boundary’.

And now the icing on the ‘bad arguments’ cake.

Appeal to popularity. Look, you could do this with almost anything. ‘Being English is unpopular’ I mean, look at all the land that ‘isn’t English’. Or, ‘eating a healthy diet is not popular’, guess that makes it okay to live on junk food. Or, ‘parliamentary democracy is unpopular’, guess we should stop that too.

Just because something is not popular does not make it wrong!

The last page is a rather good summary of AV, noteworthy if only because it talks about votes in piles, not an electronic voting machine in sight. So, they agree at least that we don’t need to spend £130 million on voting machines.

Oh, and they repeat the falsehood ‘The candidate with the most votes wins’. My arse.

On the reverse of the folded leaflet is this little beauty.

I’m having difficulty finding the case for first past the post here. And as an argument against AV it’s a complete red herring with a little ad hominem, a side order of bogeyman all smothered in a heavy irrelevant dressing. After all, Clegg got in under first past the post. And ‘the only vote that would count under AV would be Nick Clegg’s’. Really? I don’t recall reading that in the description of the AV voting system.

Look, this is not a sex discrimination issue. It’s a statistics issue. Women crash less and when they do crash the results are less costly to compensate. Fact. Simple fact. If you’re less of a risk then your insurance is less. It’s a simple, uncomplicated system. Sure, it’s not perfect but saying it is an issue of sexual discrimination is just fucking stupid.

To make matters worse, what the insurance companies will do is raise women’s insurance without lowering men’s. This is what they will do, but it’s not what makes sense. Insurance costs are amortised over the group insured. Given that the new group includes both men and women, the average risk across the whole group falls somewhere between the previous two groups. Put another way, while the risk of a man having an accident remains the same, the risk of a person (man or woman) having an accident is actually slightly lower—similarly, while the risk of a woman having an accident is comparatively low, the risk of a person having an accident is markedly higher.

The losers here are everyone but the insurance companies. After all, most women are not going to stop carrying insurance (a few will stop driving admittedly, but experience shows most people will compensate in other areas rather than give up their personal transport). So, insurance companies will be in for a bumper harvest if this sticks. (Note to self, buy shares in motor insurance companies.)

Some jerk will now point out that insurance is also ageist. If you’re young your insurance is very high and as you get older it goes down until you reach a certain age where it goes up again because statistically young people are more likely to have an accident than older people and very old people are more likely to have accidents than those in their 50s and 60s. But, according to the logic just applied by Europe this is age discrimination and age discrimination is a big no-no in the workplace so…

If this one stuck then insurance would go up even higher to compensate for young male drivers (oops, sorry, young drivers—can’t discriminate on sex EVEN THOUGH IT’S A STATISTICALLY JUSTIFIABLE ACTUARIAL WEIGHTING GARGH!).

After ageism the next thing will be fucking careless jerks. Hey, you can’t charge me more for insurance just ‘cos I’m careless. That’s discrimination and as we know in this PC ‘everyone’s a winner’ world, we can’t discriminate on the basis of ability. Everyone should pay the same insurance, even if they have had one or twelve accidents in their driving career.

On the whole I think the European exercise is both beneficial and historically inevitable but sometimes I despair, I really do…

• India has more billionaires than the UK.
• India has a thriving middle class.
• India’s GDP at Parity is £3.8trillions while the UK’s is $2.16[1]
• India’s economy is projected to grow at nearly 10% per year, while the UK economy is stagnating.
• India spends £750m a year on a space program.
• India gives £295m in aid to other countries.

It is these last three that seem to me to make the UK giving aid to India a nonsense.

Aid worker protest that India’s tax structure is in no position to replace the aid (redistributing the wealth from those who have to those who are starving) and they point to the massive poverty in the country. Both of these may be true. But India spends £750m on a space program and they send £295m in aid to other countries! In other words they have at least ONE BILLION POUNDS that could be usefully redirected to helping the poverty stricken citizens of their own country.

Okay, that’s somewhat simplistic as the space program will in part be helping to keep their billionaires in pocket change and I am sure there are some good arguments about how the Space industry helps pay many people’s wages. But if you have a poverty problem in your country why the hell are you giving away £295m to other countries?

The answer, of course, is political cachet. Well, I’m sure all those starving people in India feel better knowing their politicians can claim to be helping out. Well, from where I’m standing it looks like the UK is basically underwriting this political gesture and not benefiting India one bit—UK £300m in, India take that £300m and give £295m to someone else, okay somewhere £5m get’s lost in the post so the people for whom the aid is intended benefit by, at best, £5m. (And yes, I do realise that more countries that just the UK give aid to India, but you see my point about the stupidity of this situation?)

Look, India, why not tell the UK who you give the £295m to, we’ll stop giving you cash and redirect it to those who, by your own actions, need it more than you do? Better yet, scale back your space program and start feeding your own people! Oh, and while we’re at it; you now have a growing economy, sort your bloody tax system out and start feeding your own people!

1 Source, WolframAlpha taken 1 Mar 2011

Java on Mac OS X is being deprecated. This means that Apple will not continue developing a Java virtual machine in the future. There is hope that this effort will be picked up by the open source community, but also concern that the required knowledge of OS X internals will not be available, and so the effort will be somewhat hobbled.

Flash will no longer be deployed as part of OS X but there is currently no sign that it will be actively banned from the OS.

The App Store will operate in much the same way as the existing iPad, iPod and iPhone App Store. It will be a walled garden, guarded by Apple, providing easy access to Apple-approved applications. So far there is no indication that Apple will prevent users from installing their own applications alongside App Store products.

So, what are Apple up to? Is this going to kill Mac OS X?

It seems fairly obvious to me that Apple have a strategy to commoditise their product line and these moves suggest that OS X, and consequently their laptop and desktop products, will become commodity products in due course.

This is a galling thought for some, and I confess a little shiver of disappointment myself, but it could make perfect sense for Apple.

Controlling the channel through which applications are delivered to a hardware platform reduces the risk of poor quality applications befouling the user experience and reduces the risk of infection from malicious code (like viruses). For most users this is a good thing. Most people are willing to give up some freedoms (the freedom to install any software they like, from whatever source they like) in order to have a secure user experience.

Most home users have a fairly small list of activities they want to be able to do from their computer; e-mail, surfing the Internet, writing a letter, keeping basic accounts, store and process photos, and so on. Adding the App Store provides these facilities at low cost with high quality, and for this most users will gladly surrender the ability to get their software from outside sources.

This attitude is anathema to the technically competent, but they tend to miss the point; most people neither want nor need the flexibility they espouse. Apple are going after a different, and much larger, market: the normal user who does not have time to figure out the technical intricacies of using their computer. The user who just wants the damned thing to work reliably and securely.

Apple seem content to sacrifice the needs of their smaller technical audience in order to provide for the much larger commodity audience.

I suspect that Apple will allow users of OS X to operate in a ‘safe’ mode, locked in their safe walled garden, but continue to allow the techies the freedom to work as they prefer, at least for the foreseeable future. Apple must be careful not to totally alienate those who develop for their platform (and let’s face it, these are the techies) otherwise they risk having no creative force behind their App Store. But they won’t go that far and if their strategy works they will have plenty of people willing to work ‘the Apple way’ in order to take advantage of the captive market.

I love my Mac and I would hate for it to become neutered completely, but I do see the point of Apple’s approach and providing I can run a virtual machine on OS X I can install Linux and Windows to run within them those tasks that OS X does not support (something I already do).

So, to coin a phrase from Samuel Clemens, rumours of the death of the Mac are being greatly exaggerated.

I’ve worked with public sector workers and there are many who genuinely do a sterling job for piss poor pay (though it has to be said their retirement plans are the envy of many in the private sector – not least me). However, I have also encountered more than my fair share of feckless wankers who are not fit to shine shoes in a society that eschews footwear.

And the public sector is not the only place such people hide (though it has to be said that, in an effort to disguise unemployment the last government seemed more willing than previous administrations to be ‘flexible’ about employing the initiative challenged).

I am not unsympathetic to the Sword of Damocles suspended over the heads of honest, hard working people in the public sector but let’s be honest, how many of hard working people, in any organisation, could not nominate at least one fellow worker as a drain on the organisational purse.

As for the unions. Oh dear Lord, don’t get me started on the unions. Back in the first half of the 20th century the unions performed an immensely important function. There is no doubt that we would not enjoy the working conditions we have now without unions. But. But, there is a distinct difference between unions fighting for the rights of workers and the self serving politicos and media whores that preen themselves before the camera and microphone today. Be not fooled, today’s unions are nothing more than hollow ideological shell. A shadow of glories past. Grasping to exert political power that they should never be permitted.
</rant>

For those who don’t know (where have you been), Safari Reader is simple mechanism built into Safari 5 that presents a ‘Reader’ button in the address bar if the browser recognises the page you are visiting as an article (as against, for example, a home page filled with links). Click on the Reader button and an overlay appears, the page is dimmed, and the article’s content is presented without all the page decoration. Things like headers, menus and, of course, advertisements are all removed from the Reader view. It is this last, adverts, that has people squealing.

[Yes, I know this functionality is available through FireFox and Chrome add-ons (like Readability) too. And yes, I know Apple 'stole' the idea.]

It is absurd to suggest that Reader is bad for the internet. We have had Ad Blocker and its ilk removing adverts from pages for a long time now and somehow the internet advertising model seems to lumber on (any site that fails to make money from advertising immediately blames ad blockers, although more likely they are simply not supplying good content or appropriately targeted advertising).

Perhaps a more pertinent question that sites should address is ‘why are people using Reader in the first place?’ I seldom use Ad Blocker software and I have seldom used Reader (it is useful for one thing though, it chains together multiple page articles, saving me the trouble of clicking through several pages). Most websites I visit are designed reasonably and the advertising seldom impinges on the reading experience (besides, after many years of reading online I think my brain pretty effectively filters adverts from pages anyway, I seldom notice them). If your site is so bad, if the adverts are so intrusive, that I use Reader then that’s your problem. Design your site with adverts by all means, but if people use ad blockers or Reader to avoid them then you should probably think about redesigning your site, not blaming Reader.